The Keeper of the Gate Read online

  THE KEEPER OF THE GATE

  Three Lovecraftian Stories

  William Meikle

  Copyright William Meikle 2019

  CONTENTS

  THE KEEPER OF THE GATE

  OUT OF THE BLACK

  EENY MEENY MINEY MI-GO

  FURTHER READING

  The Keeper of the Gate

  W e almost went off the road twice, lights flashing and sirens blaring, doing forty on the bends despite the snow. Shots fired was the message.

  We were too late to stop any bullets hitting their targets—and far too late to catch the shooter. Two bodies—two children—lay in the driveway, half-naked and already freezing, single gunshot wounds to the back of the head. The father sat in the hall just inside the door—shot in the left eye with an exit wound that had taken off the back of his skull and decorated the wall in Jackson Pollock red.

  "Where's the mother?" Jake Rogers asked me, but I didn't have an answer.

  We searched the house and did a tour around the outside. Ours were the only footprints in the snow, and there were none around the dead girls' bodies. No tire tracks either.

  "Did the father do it, then do himself?" Jake asked.

  "If so, where's the weapon?" I replied.

  That had us both stumped.

  We had a wait ahead of us—the forensics boys were tied up on another shooting downtown—Saturday night in the city this close to Christmas brought out more crazies than normal, and tonight was no exception. Jake and I were used to seeing shooting victims—just not out here in the 'burbs on the coast, and not pre-teen girls lying half-naked in snowy driveways. I'll admit I was more than a bit twitchy as we stood in the relative warmth of the hallway waiting for the cavalry to show up.

  Matters didn't improve any when the chanting started up in the cellar.

  "Didn't you check down there?" I whispered.

  Jake had his gun out already.

  "I thought you did."

  The chanting got louder—there were at least three voices, maybe more.

  Jake reached for the door handle. As soon as his fingers touched it the chanting stopped, like a needle taken off a vinyl record. Everything went quiet again.

  "Cover me," Jake whispered, and pulled the door open.

  There seemed to be nothing but darkness beyond, but Jake wasn't to be deterred. I followed him, gingerly, down the cellar steps.

  "Armed police," he shouted. "We're coming down. Don't do anything stupid."

  There was no response. I got my flashlight off my belt and switched it on, the sudden flare of light almost blinding me so that at first all I could see was the back of Jake's head.

  There was still no sound from below, and the place was so quiet and dark I started to wonder whether we'd actually heard what we thought we'd heard. Then there was a shuffling scrape, as of something heavy being dragged across a dirt floor.

  "Don't move," Jake shouted.

  I swung the flashlight down, but with Jake in the way, the space was too confined to show me anything beyond a couple of square yards at the foot of the steps.

  There was another scrape, deeper in the darkness. Somebody moaned—a woman, in some pain.

  The mother?

  "Armed police," Jake shouted again. If I didn't know him so well I might not have noticed the tremor in his voice. "Come on out where we can see you."

  Jake stepped off the steps onto the cellar floor, giving me space to move the beam of the flashlight around. I saw the pale shape in the gloom just before lighting up the body. She lay spread-eagled, naked on a circular diagram that had been crudely scratched in the dirt. Whoever had moaned, it hadn't been her—her dead eyes stared at the ceiling although there was no obvious sign of any wound. A gun lay on the floor, just outside the etched circle.

  Jake dropped into a crouch and pointed his own weapon into the far-left corner.

  "I see you, back there," he shouted. "Come on out."

  I swung the light around to where Jake was aiming, but all I found were rough walls and storage crates.

  "What did you see, Jake?"

  He didn't reply. I swung the light around to look him in the eye. He was as white as a sheet, and shaking. He turned on his heels and went back up the steps, almost running.

  I stood there for long seconds, turning in a full circle, searching the whole space. I was quite alone in the cellar.

  The father's prints were the only ones on the gun. The case was closed almost before we finished the paperwork. Neither the chanting nor the moaning made their way into our reports—Jake and I both knew that would just lead to questions we couldn't answer. Murder, suicide was the verdict and it was all tied up in a pretty bow for public consumption. I wasn't happy, but I couldn't see what else could be done.

  Jake had other ideas.

  I found him in his usual perch at O'Hara's—far end of the bar near the Guinness tap. He had a pint of the black stuff waiting for me.

  "Did the Captain tell you how the father shot himself then threw the gun down into the cellar?" he asked. He sounded weary, but there was something else there too, something I couldn't quite identify. "Did he tell you how the wife died of shock on finding him and fell down the stairs, just happening to land dead center on that…whatever it was? And all of this through a closed cellar door?"

  "I don't think they want anyone to look too closely, Jake," I replied. "They don't want a scandal. The father was some kind of big cheese in finance. You know what happens in those cases—ranks get closed, favors get called in…"

  "…and questions get quietly buried. Yeah. I know."

  "That's not what's eating you, is it?" I asked. "We've played the game too often for this one to be getting to you."

  He ordered two whiskeys—that's when I knew it was serious.

  "I saw something," he said softly. "Down in that cellar. I saw something."

  I knew now what I was seeing in his eyes—it was fear, and that got me scared, for big Jake Rogers had never been afraid of anything in his life.

  I downed my whiskey in one.

  "Tell me," I said.

  At first I wasn't sure I was going to get an answer, and when I did it was in a managed whisper so that only I would hear.

  "It was just dim lights at first," he said. "A dancing pattern of lights. I thought it might be her ghost."

  If anyone else had said that to me, I'd have laughed it off, but Jake wasn't a man prone to flights of fancy. Work, booze and football were his holy trinity; for him, fiction was something read by people who couldn't handle reality.

  "What do you mean?" I asked, not entirely sure I wanted to know.

  "I only caught a glimpse—you know that, you were there. It was only a dark shadow when I first glanced at it. I thought it was a woman, hunched over, standing deep in the corner. But just before you shone the light over that way, I got a good look. You know those pictures the telescope in space takes—galaxies and nebulas and gas clouds and shit? Like that—only small, in the corner, but big at the same time, as if I could have walked into it—walked into infinity and never looked back."

  He'd got it all out fast, as if afraid to stop. Now I didn't know what to say in reply.

  "Jake, we'd just had a shock and…"

  "I know what I saw," he said, interrupting me. "This isn't over. Something happened in that house. That family were murdered—all of them. I'm going to find out who did it."

  What can I say? Jake had been my partner for more than a decade. The next day, we started digging.

  We had to keep it off the books, so it was slow going at first, snatching what time we could to look into the families' life. The father, John Mitchell, was a bigwig in a trading house—he managed futures in commodities, effectively guess
ing which way the market might go, and backing his best guesses with cash—lots of cash. There was motive aplenty in that cash—the kind of amounts that attracts shysters like flies to shit.

  But this didn't smell like a robbery gone bad—it was messy, but not messy enough.

  We went deeper. Jake got Mitchell's laptop from evidence—don't ask—and we had Joe Kaspervitch go through it for us. Our fifty bucks didn't get us much, but it got us Mitchell's last draft email—one he never got round to sending, and one that started Jake's gears grinding in the right direction.

  "I want out," it read. "It's getting too close now. The risk isn't worth the reward. We should stop while we're ahead."

  Unfortunately there was no sign of any intended recipients, but Jake had a sniff of conspiracy in his nose now.

  We dug deeper still.

  We discovered that Mitchell was just one of a group of businessmen—rising stars if you like—who, in the last eighteen months, had taken the sector by storm, making money hand over fist in the Futures markets like no one had ever managed before. There was talk of methods, patterns, even a faint whiff of skullduggery, but the bottom line was that these guys were getting rich fast, and no one knew how they were doing it.

  "We should talk to these other guys," Jake said, We were back in O'Hara's, on the black stuff. The case had its hooks in my partner now, and like a terrier with a bone, he was in no mood to let go. "Look at that last email again. Mitchell wanted out—that would threaten the gravy train. There's our motive, right there."

  "We can't," I said, trying to be the voice of reason. "The case is closed, and so are the ranks of the great and good. We can't go charging around like a bull in a china shop—we've got no evidence."

  Jake smiled and I realized I'd fallen into his trap.

  "Well, let's go find some then. There must be something in the Mitchell house that everybody missed."

  Disturbing a crime scene was enough to get us both shit-canned, but I didn't mention it as we opened the door, slipped under the tape and went into the dark hallway—it wasn't as if this was our first time at this particular dance.

  For half an hour I thought Jake was going to be disappointed. We went through the ground floor fast—nothing to see but the normal domestic habits of a family with two kids—and a stain on the hallway wall I didn't like to look at too closely.

  Upstairs proved little more fruitful, although a search of the study delivered a small notebook tucked in the back of a drawer that contained columns of letters and figures that were obviously in some sort of code. Jake pocketed that, and finally we headed to the one place neither of us really wanted to go—down into the dark cellar.

  Despite our best efforts, neither of us could find a light switch, so we both had our flashlights lit as we went down—me first this time. My fingers were twitching to draw my weapon—it felt like the situation demanded it, but I knew it was just my mind reminding me of the last time. Even so, I half expected to see a naked corpse on the dusty floor when I reached the foot of the steps. I let out a sigh of relief when a sweep of the torch showed nothing but the etched circle of strange pictograms, the design partially scuffed and smudged by the footprints of the cops and forensics men that had come through here.

  A bulb burst into light just above my head, almost blinding me. I turned to see Jake, hand on a switch.

  "Well, that's something at least," he replied, and smiled, although I saw the same tension in his eyes that I felt in my chest.

  We made a search of the room, each of us—consciously or otherwise, working around the drawn marks on the floor, as if fearful of stepping on—or worse, inside, the lines. There was nothing to see but packing cases, packed earth and dry walls. I was about to admit defeat when Jake hushed me into silence.

  "Do you hear it?" he whispered.

  If I hadn't known Jake better, I might have thought he was about to take a powder. Then I heard it too—distant chanting, getting louder.

  "Where the fuck is it coming from?" I whispered, suddenly afraid to raise my voice. The chanting got closer—a strange, guttural cacophony that contained no words of any language I could recognize. At that point I wasn't even sure that human vocal chords were capable of making the sounds we heard—yips and cries, chirps and whistles intermingled with bass drones and harsh glottal stops. The whole effect chilled me to the bone, exaggerated by a sudden blast of cold air that swept through the room like a gale.

  "Somebody opened a window," I said.

  "I don't think so," Jake replied, and pointed into the left-hand corner of the room.

  At first it was just a darker shadow that seemed to suck the light away, leaving only bitter cold behind. My eyes strained to make out detail as the chanting rang in my ears and the room vibrated in sympathy. The light fitting swung lazily in time.

  My whole body shook, vibrating with the rhythm. My head swam, and it seemed as if the walls of the cellar melted and ran. The light receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint in a blanket of darkness, and I was alone, in a cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the pounding chant.

  I saw stars—vast swathes of gold and blue and silver, all dancing in great purple and red clouds that spun webs of grandeur across unending vistas. Shapes moved in and among the nebulae; dark, wispy shadows casting a pallor over whole galaxies at a time, shadows that capered and whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. I was buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, but as the beat grew ever stronger I cared little. I gave myself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the stars.

  I don't know how long I wandered in the space between. I forgot myself, forgot Jake, dancing in the vastness where only rhythm mattered.

  After a while I dreamed. I dreamed a funeral—an open coffin where Jake's pale face stared up at me, a face I could barely see through my tears. I stretched out a hand to touch his cheek.

  A gunshot brought me back—reeled in like a hooked fish, tugged reluctantly through a too tight opening and emerging into the blazing light of a cold cellar.

  Jake stood in a firing crouch, emptying a clip into the corner. I drew my own gun and joined in, despite not being able to see anything but darker shadow. My ears rang, almost deafened by the shots in the close confinement. All too quickly my trigger pulled on empty. The echoes died away leaving dead silence behind.

  Jake and I stood in a quiet, empty cellar that suddenly felt warm and stifling. We took one look at each other and headed for the steps at a run. He beat me to it, just, but I was level by the time we barrelled through the hallway and stumbled, almost fell, out into the driveway. A blanket of cold stars mocked us from on high as we drove off, leaving a squeal of tires in our wake.

  "What the fuck just happened?"

  O'Hara's bar again, and more of the black stuff, helped down with whiskey. Jake hadn't spoken since we left the cellar, but at least his hands stopped shaking as we headed into the second pint of Guinness.

  "Magician's tricks and fucking hocus-pocus," he said. "That's what fucking happened. I told you there was something hinky going on. I fucking told you."

  What I'd seen—and felt—back in the cellar was a bit more than hinky, but I knew when to keep my mouth shut if nothing else.

  "We're onto something," Jake said. "Somebody just tried to warn us off."

  "Actually, I think they succeeded," I said, and got more of the Guinness inside me, trying to make a warm spot in a body that still held too much memory of dancing a cold empty vastness.

  Jake took out the small notebook—I'd forgotten all about it, but he'd had it in his pocket the whole time.

  "This is it," he said. "This is the thing that will crack the case open for us."

  I wasn't sure where he was getting his certainty, but I trusted his instincts. He started to rifle through the pages.

  "Maybe we should just leave it alone?" I said. "I saw something back there. I…"

  "I don't want to know," Jake replied. It wasn't fear in his eyes this tim
e—it was pleading. "Whatever we saw, it was just a trick. What else could it be?"

  That was a question I asked myself all the way home. I fell into bed, but sleep was a long time in coming. When I finally drifted off I fell into dreams of dancing galaxies, naked women lying on crudely carved circles and Jake's dead eyes staring up at me through my tears.

  I didn't feel rested on wakening, and when I got to work we caught a drive-by shooting that took us most of the morning to wrap up. When we finally got a quiet minute back at the precinct, Jake pulled me aside next to the coffee machine.

  "I showed Kaspervitch the notebook. He say's it's a simple substitution cipher. He's working on it now. We should get the gen in an hour or so."

  "And then what?" I asked. I was weary. I couldn't see an end on Jake's current path that I liked, and I kept seeing that last dream, of him in the coffin. I started to get a real bad feeling, and what I wanted more than anything else was to just lose myself in the daily grind and forget all about the Mitchell case. But Jake was my partner, and that bought him a lot of slack. I decided to back his play—for the time being at least.

  He hadn't noticed my reticence.

  "I told you—we'll crack this case wide open. We're onto something. I feel it in my water."

  All I felt in mine was cold, a deep chill that even copious amounts of black coffee wouldn't shift. Jake whispered something as we went back to our desks. I didn't quite catch it, and didn't know how important it would prove.

  "I've seen it."

  "It's a diary," Kaspervitch said, dropping the notebook on Jake's desk and making Jake's fifty disappear into an inside pocket. "Dates and places, I'm guessing of some kind of business meetings, for a lot of the names in his email contacts turn up in there too. But if they are business meetings, the times and places are off—unless I've made a mistake, all these meetings take place in quiet spots, in the middle of the night."

  Jake looked up at me and smiled.

  "See—I told you it was hinky."